Review: Riverfront Playhouse’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ – A Fruitful Production

This was our first visit to the Riverfront Playhouse, and we were rewarded with a compelling rendition of Steinbeck’s novel about itinerant farmers fleeing Oklahoma’s Dust Bowl in the 1930s.

Director Samantha Fork intentionally set out to make Steinbeck’s classic relevant to today’s world, a task aided by the author’s trademark unconditional love for humanity.

The Riverfront stage itself reminded me of the B Street Theater in Sacramento, where I’ve attended many plays in the past. The stage is cocked 90 degrees, providing the actors two fronts to approach the audience. It’s refreshing to see actors in profile, instead of addressing the audience head-on all the time.

The play begins with the iconic Joad family, after years of sticking it out on the windblown plains of Oklahoma, picking up the pieces and heading west to California. There are more than a dozen family members and friends clambering board their claptrap Ford flatbed, and dead weight must be thrown by the wayside.

Everyone is pretty much agreed that the deadest weight of all is failed preacher Jim Casey (John Welsh), except for Ma Joad (Tammy Jones) whose tragic flaw is helping everyone and anyone still alive climb aboard the California express, rather than leave them behind. They spend the first act puttering their four-cylinder truck across the Arizona desert and over the mountains into California, along the way burying those too weak to survive the harsh, months-long journey.

We attended a media night presentation of the play, which invites constructive criticism. We were very impressed with the entire production, but felt it might benefit from some tightening up of the first act. I didn’t clock it, but the second act concludes so powerfully, I felt just as stunned as Pa Joad (Dan Kupsky) when their California dream was drowned beneath a biblical flood. I was bummed that it was over. Perhaps that was the point!

This production of “The Grapes of Wrath” provides audiences a chance to literally rub elbows with the large ensemble of actors as they enter and exit the stage. It’s impossible not to feel sympathy for the Joads, and antipathy for their destroyers: unscrupulous agribusiness owners and their law enforcement lackeys.

If that sound a little bit familiar, it just goes to show how Steinbeck was able to distill the essential elements of class structure in California. If you don’t cry after the ending of this one, then you’re a very cold fish indeed.

R.V. Scheide has been a northern California journalist for more than 20 years. He appreciates your comments and story ideas.